Science Glance
You may think that 1 trillion noisy periodical cicadas emerging in the Midwest and southern states this spring is gross – but we’ve got something even more disgusting to tell you.
As the Brood XIII and Brood XIX cicadas emerge, the two broods will also produce huge amounts of pee. Yes, pee, more commonly called honeydew or cicada rain, according to John Cooly, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut.
Periodical cicadas, which appear in large numbers once every 13 to 17 years, have the unique ability to urinate in high-velocity jets, according to a recent article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Cicadas can consume 300 times their weight in xylem, or plant sap, each day. They can release their pee as high as 10 feet in the air in a second, according to the New York Times.
A dead spacecraft the size of a truck ignites with plasma and pulverizes into dust and litter as it rips through the ionosphere and atmosphere. This is what happens to internet service satellites during re-entry. When the full mega-constellation of satellites is deployed in the 2030s, companies will do this every hour because satellite internet requires thousands of satellites to constantly be replaced. And it could compromise our atmosphere or even our magnetosphere.
Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called "God particle" that helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang, has died at age 94, the University of Edinburgh said Tuesday.
